Every episode of Doctor Who, 1963-present, one day at a time

Main menu

Tag Archives: Captain Magambo

* I will never forget the Easter of 2009. For the first time since the revival, a brand new episode of Doctor Who was not the most exciting TV event of the week. Red Dwarf, the show I’ve been running a fansite for since I was in school, returned for a three-part special, a decade after the original run ended. A huge number of us squeezed into the house I’d just moved into, for three straight nights of blogging, podcasting and boozing. Frankly, Doctor Who was an unwelcome distraction.

* I am naturally predisposed to side against the incredibly posh and privileged, so I wasn’t thrilled to have one of them as a companion. Michelle Ryan is perfectly fine, but Lady Christina is more than a little annoying. In fact, she’s reprehensible. It’s probably as much to do with me as it is with the character, but that type of entitlement goes against everything I stand for. She doesn’t steal because she needs to, she just does it for the thrill, and gets away with it because her status.

* That’s quite the collection of recognisable telly faces on the bus. One of the Julies from Bad Girls! Tealeaf from Psychoville! Her from Teachers! And apparently (I didn’t recognise him in the show, but I read afterwards that) her husband used to be in Boney M!

* Odd to be having another bus-based story so soon after Midnight. The situation is very different, obviously, but reminiscent enough to warrant an acknowledgement in the script. I was expecting the opportunity to get to know the passengers, and to discover their secrets and fears, but it was all very superficial – we got the reassuring mundanity of them cooking chops and watching telly, but we learned little about them as individuals.

* I see UNIT are still being a shower of absolute shits. They’re *just* a bunch of blokes with guns these days – none of the various leaders we’ve met offer much in the way of a humanising presence – and now shoot-to-kill is their default policy. They do, however, have Lee Evans. If you like Lee Evans, I imagine his unmistakable brand of Norman Wisdom impersonation would have been a welcome addition to the episode. I do not like Lee Evans.

* The whole thing is incredibly lightweight for a special, but that’s sort of fine – this was obviously only one of several specials that year, not the big centrepiece that Christmas usually is, and so it can afford to do something a little less serious, with its big friendly flies, its flying bus and its salacious Doctor-companion snog. It’s not bad if you’re not expecting an epic, but it does mean that the the deeply dark foreshadowing at the end is a bit of a crunching gear change. And once again, a soothsayer acts the prick by being deliberately vague, rather than spilling the beans properly or keeping schtum altogether.

* A friend of mine once got into a dispute with one of the co-writers, via the letters page of Doctor Who Magazine, regarding the politics of the ending. Suffice to say, with UNIT in the state they’re in at the moment, I’m not particularly comfortable with the supposedly pacifist Doctor concluding that joining the army will make men of those two lads. He then compounds this by deciding that the criminal aristocrat deserves to evade justice once again. I dunno. The Doctor is kind of whatever you want him to be; he’s done so much over the years that you can pick and choose the evidence that proves he fits whichever socio-political stance you care to name. But naturally, I’m going to react negatively on the handful of occasions where he takes a stance that’s categorically incompatible with my own.

* It’s hard to reconcile my residual dislike of Donna with the acknowledgement of her importance to The Doctor. My first reaction to the idea that he’d be dead without her is to scoff, but when I think back to The Runaway Bride, I have to concede that her function in that episode, when she was intended to be a one-off, is to snap the Doctor out of his post-Rose funk. It makes the question of whether it’s Donna that’s important, or if it’s just the Time Beetle, an interesting one, as you could interpret her original appearance as a case of being in the right place at the right time.

* In an episode all about the consequences of Donna never meeting The Doctor, one of the worst side-effects is her reverting to her pre-Series 4 personality for half an episode. And in an episode that revisits the recent past, it’s amusing that Donna’s beetle backpack evokes memories of Sarah Jane’s spider backpack. There’s also the return of Chantho, this time as a psychotic fortune teller, and the circle of mirrors being kinda like Kinda.

* I do like a big continuity-based romp, and it was easier to do back when there were only four series’ worth of things to remember. It’s always worth reiterating just how many times, and in how many ways, The Doctor has saved everyone’s arse. This episode tells us that also saves the lives of his former companions just by being around – he shows up to deal with the really dangerous stuff, so that they don’t have to put themselves at risk. Without him, they have to deputise, and they really don’t last very long.

* The depiction of a post-apocalyptic dystopia is stunning, adding an extra layer to prevent the episode from being just a continuity-based filler. Rather than just leaving it at bad things happening to characters that we know, it was great that they took the time to explore what happens in the aftermath of these disasters. It was grim stuff – people had to move to Leeds. It’s kind of how I picture the real UK will be after Brexit and five more years of Tories, and that was before they started rounding up immigrants. That was the darkest and most affecting part of the show, and it was neat how they didn’t need to explicitly state what happened at the labour camps, but you totally got it. Cribbins was amazing – his reaction should be shown to far right groups, as a warning of where their nonsense leads. Do you really want to make Cribbins cry? Do you?

* Lovely to see Rose, but why can’t she talk properly? She seems so different after just two years away, and it’s a bit sad – I can’t tell whether she’s supposed to have changed and developed off-screen since we saw her last, or whether it’s Billie not quite remembering how to play her. Rose has existed as an unattainable ideal for the last couple of series, so it’s hard to live up to the legend on her first reappearance. I tell you what though, that Bad Wolf stuff at the end was amazing – it was on the Pull To Open sign and everything!